Second Life

[robinturner]

After deciding to do my ENG 102 course on virtual worlds, I thought I'd take another look at Second Life. (I'm thinking of doing the first part of the course on virtual worlds in fiction and film, and the second half on attempts at creating actual virtual worlds, if that isn't an oxymoron.) I first looked at Second Life when it was in beta and thought, "Hmmm, this is like Quake, except you can't kill people and it runs at 1/10 of the speed." Now, four years later, with a decent Internet connection and graphics card, it looks rather better, although the lag is still appalling at times. And I can look like a dork in VR too!



First impressions are that most people in SL either make money to buy stuff or make stuff to make money. The rest of the time, they dance and flirt. In other words, it's just like real life viewed through a letterbox in low res. Idoru, it ain't.

Still, I gather there is much more to SL than this. So my question for my dear readers is: Do any of you hang out in Second Life? And what do you actually do there?

Comments

[rodneyorpheus.livejournal.com]

Those were my first impressions as well, but after spending a lot more time there I realised, in the immortal words of David Byrne, that first impressions are often correct.

It's slow and cruddy ancient technology and I have no idea what people actually do there apart from (try to) make money and have sex. Or more accurately, spend money and not have sex.

Second Life: just like your first life only lower res. I'll stick to Lord of the Rings Online methinks.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I agree about the tech side. If someone is connecting to your service via ethernet, they should get zero lag with all the graphic and sound features cranked up to the max. I had less lag ad better graphics on Guild Wars with a crappy wireless connection and a GeForce IV card.

The basic idea is brilliant, though - kind of like lambdaMOO with graphics. If they beef up their servers (or get bought out by Google) then we could see something a bit more Gibsonesque.

Or more accurately, spend money and not have sex.

I was puzzled at why people keep trying to have sex in cyberspace until a colleague drew my attention to a survey on sexual attraction which showed that the less realistic images were, the more people got turned on by them (up to a point - I don't think many people get the hots for a Braque). The researchers found that anime artists have hit exactly the right spot.

[rodneyorpheus.livejournal.com]

It's not enough to beef up the servers, the code base is just not very scalable. Basically, it's just old crap software technology.

And your point about Guild Wars is well made, that's still the pinnacle of well programmed MMOs in my opinion.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Maybe open-sourcing it will help, though I'm not sure, given that OSS prgrammers are generally not so good at that kind of thing. While the people at GNOME and KDE have got out of the "What's wrong with the command line?" attitude, the gamers either seem to be stuck at the "What's wrong with Nethack?" stage or are obsessed with making clones of perfectly good commercial games (Lincity, Freeciv etc). I suppose Planeshift may develop into something decent, but a quick look gives me the impression that it's still stuck at the "Let's make something like WoW" stage.

I'd like to see SL work because there's a need for that kind of online environment. What I want is to be able to go into an online space where, according to my mood, I can take part in a linguistics seminar, build a tree house, watch a fashion show, give tutorials to my students, or, yes, kill monsters. Yes, I know the name of that space is "the Internet", but it would be nice to have it seamlessly integrated.